- November 19th, 2021, 1:52 am#4960449
Hi everyone! After more than a year of dreaming and planning to build my very own proton pack from scratch, I had a fire lit under me in July as I really wanted to attend my first post-pandemic convention as a Ghostbuster. I had all my costume pieces assembled, except for the pack itself. So I quickly set my plan in motion and bought all of the supplies I needed to bring this thing to life.
I would like to give a big shout out to the two people who really helped me with this project! KCGhostbuster not only had the very timelapse video that inspired me to make an EVA foam pack, his EVA pack thread was also a huge help and I could not have built this without his wisdom. I would also like to thank Robrebooted because his build thread is incredible and further inspired me to make this pack. He also had so many tips that motivated me to find objects around my house and save a few bucks while still making my pack look pretty accurate. And when I was having a pretty tough time assembling the thrower, his thread really came in handy so that I could figure it out. So many headaches were saved by these guys. Thank you SO much, you two!
A few caveats before I begin:
--Unfortunately I did not finish the pack in time for the convention deadline, but I did come pretty close! I was able to improvise my “proton pack”; I scrawled “PRETEND THIS IS A PROTON PACK” on a piece of paper and pinned it to a regular backpack. It was a hit! Got plenty of laughs and pictures to make me feel better about not meeting my deadline. I also brought my Spirit PKE meter to the convention, so I was still pretty recognizable even without a pack. I wasn’t bummed about not meeting the deadline because I still had plenty of time to finish before the premiere of Afterlife or even October. But I’m still glad I had a deadline to work against because I wouldn’t have been as motivated otherwise!
--I tried to make this pack using the cheapest yet most trustworthy materials I could get my hands on. It wasn’t dirt cheap in the end, but for my first pack I think I did pretty well on my budget. I didn’t want to go over $250, and if I did my math correctly I was well under that (excluding the materials that I already had lying around the house). I’ll post the total expenses at the end of the thread.
--The second biggest factor in choosing my materials was weight. Not only was I concerned about heavy packs (all of my research led me to know that the real deal packs and most of the screen accurate replicas weigh a ton!) but I was also nervous about attaching heavy pieces to somewhat-flimsy EVA and foam core parts. The heaviest parts besides the motherboard are probably the PVC pipes, but thankfully all of it held up nicely.
--I probably could have finished this much faster like how KCghosbuster did it, but I had almost no prior knowledge of prop building, so a lot of this project consisted of me figuring stuff out as I went. However, since I was completely new to this, I’m so happy with the results and can’t wait to share them with you!
--My workspace was in the back room of my house, so not only will you see the funky holographic tablecloth (leftover from a recent party) in most of the process images, but I think it’s worth mentioning that this workspace definitely impacted my timeframe. This room is hardly a room since it has no insulation and is pretty much exposed to the elements the whole time. This means that I could only work after sundown so that I wouldn’t bake in the California midsummer heat, so besides a few days of afternoon work here and there, I could only chip away at my pack for 6 hours a night. I’ve also had a busy summer, so if you see any gaps in the dates it was probably because of that.
--Sorry about this thread getting super wordy and image heavy! I’ve been so excited to share my process that I might have gotten carried away while typing this up. I’ll post my full uniform with my finished pack in a separate thread soon so that you won’t have to scroll down to see the final results.
Now that all those are out of the way, let’s begin! I’ve decided to make this thread in a kind of diary format so everyone has a reference for how long this took me to make.
Before July - I already printed out the full-sized Stefan blueprints and they were (mostly) cut out and ready to be used as templates. Later on I realized I didn’t necessarily need ALL the pages printed out at full size, but they might come in handy if I scratch-build another pack in the future.
7/13 (17 days until convention) - my EVA foam arrives! I knew there was no time to waste after this. I gathered up all my tools, cut up the remaining blueprints, and prepped my workspace for the project.
7/14 - I cut up the EVA foam walls for the cyclotron walls. At this point I didn’t have my contact cement yet, so I moved on to the pieces I could hot glue before heading out to Home Depot.
7/15 - Cut and assembled the pieces of the power cell.
7/17 - Cut and glued the gun mount.
7/18 - Began to cut out pieces for the crank generator.
7/19 - Finished assembling the crank generator.
7/20 - Made the “booster box” and made sure that the booster tube would fit snugly inside!
7/21 - Finally got my contact cement! I assembled the entire cyclotron and glued the top pieces together. At this point I was getting so excited because I was beginning to see the resemblance of a real proton pack now!
7/22 - Began to gather up some PVC pipe that I had in my garage, cleaned it off, and learned how to use the pipe cutter. I cut two PVC pieces for the power cell injectors. As I mentioned before, weight was a huge concern of mine throughout this project so I made sure that the injectors were nice and sturdy and wouldn’t slip right out of the power cell. I took a leaf out of @robrebooted’s book and found some really sturdy fiberglass rods that were pieces of leftover party decorations. I drilled holes (using my off-brand Dremel because I was a little nervous about using the power drill at this point in the project, it took forever but at least it worked) in both of the pipes and stuck the rod through so that it secured them together and held them at the bottom of the power cell’s interior.
7/24 - Cut the PVC pipes for the 2 clippards, the PPD, and the top of the booster tube. Glued in the booster tube and attached the power cell to the booster tube box. Made the HGA and the corner plate and attached those to the assembled top parts.
7/25 - Assembled the ion arm, cut and glued the parts of the cyclotron spacer, and finally attached the cyclotron to the top parts. At this point the main shell is nearly complete, it just needs a few parts glued on, which I decided to create separately so that I can just glue them on after everything is sealed and painted. I rounded out the night by creating the bumper and shock mount.
7/26 - Created the booster frame and the bottom plates for the cyclotron. Glued everything onto the shell.
7/27 - Began to work on the thrower. This was especially tough to figure out because Stefan hasn’t finished these blueprints in quite a while. However, I was able to use a combination of his existing blueprints and a few other resources to make a good guess as to how big the thrower parts were supposed to be. While my thrower ended up being a little small, it fits alright in my small hands so I’m not complaining. Here is where you can first see how I used a cheap substitute for lighting my proton pack. I’ll go into detail about these lights in a little bit.
7/28 - I had somewhere to go today, but I was able to create the heatsink for the thrower before I left.
7/29 - Finished up the thrower, laid out some newspaper beneath the pack, and began sealing it to prep for the texturing and spray paint. I had a ton of white glue and tacky glue in my crafting supply, so I was able to use all of it and ended up covering the pack and thrower with a generous 5-6 coats.
7/30 - I closely followed what KCghostbuster had done to mask off certain parts of the pack before texturing it, and then I took the whole thing outside and laid it on the grass. I sprayed on the texture, waited 30 minutes or so, and then sprayed on the first layer of satin black paint. At this point I realized I wasn’t going to have enough satin black Krylon to finish the job, so I ended up using almost 2 whole cans of Rustoleum glossy black enamel on the whole pack, including the motherboard and the thrower. I know that a shiny pack isn’t exactly screen accurate, but so many things on my pack weren’t at this point that I decided it was okay. Besides, once all the details are put together, the shininess doesn’t matter all that much. Unfortunately this was the night when I was rushing to finish the pack so I wasn’t able to get pictures of my motherboard being cut, but I’m pretty sure it happened while I was getting everything painted. I chose to make my motherboard out of hardboard, because when I was choosing my material at Home Depot it seemed to be somewhat lighter than plywood yet extremely dense and sturdy. While I saw this as a great quality for my pack, it proved to be extremely difficult to cut. It was almost impossible to cut with my rotary tool, so a relative of mine ended up cutting it for me with his circular saw. A jigsaw probably would have been the best tool for such an intricate task, but thanks to his careful aim the cut was nearly perfect, and the few imperfections wouldn't show up on the outside of the pack anyways.
7/31 - By now I knew that it was time to use a power drill so that I could finish this thing faster. I drilled in my “v hook” to the gun mount and the underside of the thrower in the same spots where an accurate v hook would go. I realize now that it’s almost impossible to holster my thrower while I’m wearing the pack thanks to how small these picture hanging hooks are, but I’m sure that a combination of practice and tweaking the pack by adding in little bumpers on the sides of the hook could make this action a lot easier. Nevertheless, the hooks worked and held the thrower steady on the side of the pack.
Now to get more into my lighting idea for my pack. Since I was such a novice at building, I decided not to purchase the light and sound kit yet. Instead, I got a 5-pack of small battery-operated LED strings and also bought a pack of plastic lighting gels that came in red and blue. My plan was to feed the lights through small holes in the motherboard and secure them to the power cell and cyclotron (bunching up the lights into sections and then taping them in bundles with electrical tape), and have the battery packs secured on the back of the motherboard facing my back so they wouldn’t really be noticeable. The camera gels were used as a cost-effective and lightweight alternative to the red and blue acrylic lenses. I cut some shapes out of the red and blue gel sheets and glued them behind the cyclotron and power cell windows.
I began running into more trouble with my motherboard. As I aligned the four brackets and began to drill in the screw for the first bracket, I realized I was running my drill at one of the highest speeds and yet it still took minutes for the screw to puncture the board! This thing was incredibly difficult to drill, but at this point I had worked on it so much that I just had to roll with it. I drilled enough screws into the brackets so that they wouldn’t slide around the board, and then moved on to drilling holes and attaching my battery lights to the cyclotron and power cell.
I also began adding the parts that I had painted separately, like the filler tubes and the PPD.
8/1 - Today was the first day of attending the convention, so I had my failsafe ready to go! The setbacks I faced while drilling my motherboard frustrated me so much that I just had to let it be. I still enjoyed the convention even without my finished pack, so I wasn’t upset about it in the end. Even though my deadline passed me by, I still chipped away at it for a few more nights and I was much more relaxed while doing so.
8/2 - I drilled two holes in the ALICE frame and bolted the motherboard to the 4 attachment points and secured the battery lights to the board by using some electrical tape and hot glue, taking extra care not to damage the light strings with the hot glue gun (I don’t know how or if the copper wiring is affected by heat and I certainly didn’t want to find out at the moment). I also painted the ion arm rod, ribbon cable clamps, and the N filter stripe.
8/3 - I made sure that all of my painted pieces were dry and well-coated and then attached them to the pack. I also attached the bumper to the cyclotron.
8/4 - I got the pack somewhat bolted to the brackets before realizing another frustration; somehow along the way, the brackets shifted or the shell misaligned because none of the screws I was using were long enough to go through both the shell and the inner brackets. It took a lot of searching, but eventually I found some old long screws to drill in. However, when I carefully lifted the whole pack, the screws still felt sort of flimsy and it would be my worst nightmare if my pack decided to fall off of the frame in the middle of a night out in costume. I realized I had recently bought heavy-duty black zip ties in case something like this happened, and they worked like a charm. I threaded the zip ties through 3 holes on the top of the motherboard and shell, with two of them near the bracket screws or areas that seemed like they would bear the most weight and one of them on the very top just for some extra peace of mind.
8/8 - I finished getting all of the little odds and ends painted and attached them to the thrower. You can also see where I put two screws on the side - the screws conveniently fit into two holes I drilled into the PVC pipes that make up the front cylinder and back handle of the thrower. I purposefully made these two pipes longer than they had to be so that I could secure them inside the thrower body and give it more of a backbone, since the thrower body is made of somewhat flimsy poster board. I know that it would have been more accurate to put the access door on the bottom, but I was afraid of the whole thing falling off if there was too much stress on the little screws holding the body to the bottom while it was hooked onto the pack. Anyways, the door is very easy to screw on and off so that I can take the batteries out of the lights when the pack won’t be in use for a while, or swap in new batteries on the go.
8/15 - Drilling holes in the PVC pipe for the split loom was such a pain! The drill kept slipping so I ended up clamping it down with some extra EVA foam bits so that I wouldn't damage my desk or the thrower handle. After the holes were drilled, I zip tied both ends of the split loom so that my thrower was finally attached to the pack.
8/16 - I glued in the ribbon cable and its clamps. I was unsure how many zip ties were accurate for the cable, so I began with two as shown and then added a third one a little later just to make sure the cable wouldn’t untwist.
8/20 - I fashioned all of the Legris elbows from extra EVA foam and gave them a few coats of paint each to ensure that they wouldn’t be too flimsy. I also made my own brass elbows / hose barbs from a neat object I found in my house. It was some kind of zip tie set with cylindrical stops on one end and small barbs on the other, and all 3 of them had a Walmart logo on them. I think they were special ties for truckers to use since my relative was staying over after he was truck driving all week. Anyways, after I cut them up and glued the ends together and hit them with some gold paint, they looked so much like the real brass elbows (especially from far away)! I then got all of the tubes cut, attached to my elbows, and carefully glued onto my pack. I realized that some of the tubes in the pack I got from GBHQPartsDepot were going to be too stiff to attach to my thrower; none of the glues I was using would be able to secure them in such tight curves. Luckily I planned ahead and bought some flimsy USB cables from the dollar store, gutted them, and painted the cable tubing pieces in red and green. Although the unpainted tubes don’t look bad either, that gave me an idea to add some extra light-up tubes to my pack someday!
8/23 - I got a great sticker sheet from VanOaksProps on etsy! I carefully cut all the stickers out with my Xacto knife and stuck everything in its place. I ran into a slight problem; I forgot to mask off a couple areas on the pack (cyclotron and top of the pack behind the booster) before coating them with the spray texture, so if I tried to put the stickers on they would have either looked awful or would fall right off of the pack. To remedy this, I used pieces of the same thin craft foam sheet that I had used for the rings around the cyclotron lights. I cut them to match the size of the two stickers, painted them so that the stickers would stick better, and then hot glued them to the bumpy surface.
Aaaand finished! If I counted correctly, it took me about 26 nights to make a proton pack from scratch. Here’s the finished product all ready to go!
The total cost of my pack was about $181.49, not including all the found objects and materials I already had around the house, and also not including a few items that were bought and went unused in the project.
Again, I am so happy with my results and cannot wait to build another pack sometime in the near future! Thank you so much for checking out my build thread, I hope that if you’re a first-timer like me it’ll motivate you to try making one as well because it ended up being a lot of fun to create! If you have any questions, I’d be happy to answer them! (:
I would like to give a big shout out to the two people who really helped me with this project! KCGhostbuster not only had the very timelapse video that inspired me to make an EVA foam pack, his EVA pack thread was also a huge help and I could not have built this without his wisdom. I would also like to thank Robrebooted because his build thread is incredible and further inspired me to make this pack. He also had so many tips that motivated me to find objects around my house and save a few bucks while still making my pack look pretty accurate. And when I was having a pretty tough time assembling the thrower, his thread really came in handy so that I could figure it out. So many headaches were saved by these guys. Thank you SO much, you two!
A few caveats before I begin:
--Unfortunately I did not finish the pack in time for the convention deadline, but I did come pretty close! I was able to improvise my “proton pack”; I scrawled “PRETEND THIS IS A PROTON PACK” on a piece of paper and pinned it to a regular backpack. It was a hit! Got plenty of laughs and pictures to make me feel better about not meeting my deadline. I also brought my Spirit PKE meter to the convention, so I was still pretty recognizable even without a pack. I wasn’t bummed about not meeting the deadline because I still had plenty of time to finish before the premiere of Afterlife or even October. But I’m still glad I had a deadline to work against because I wouldn’t have been as motivated otherwise!
--I tried to make this pack using the cheapest yet most trustworthy materials I could get my hands on. It wasn’t dirt cheap in the end, but for my first pack I think I did pretty well on my budget. I didn’t want to go over $250, and if I did my math correctly I was well under that (excluding the materials that I already had lying around the house). I’ll post the total expenses at the end of the thread.
--The second biggest factor in choosing my materials was weight. Not only was I concerned about heavy packs (all of my research led me to know that the real deal packs and most of the screen accurate replicas weigh a ton!) but I was also nervous about attaching heavy pieces to somewhat-flimsy EVA and foam core parts. The heaviest parts besides the motherboard are probably the PVC pipes, but thankfully all of it held up nicely.
--I probably could have finished this much faster like how KCghosbuster did it, but I had almost no prior knowledge of prop building, so a lot of this project consisted of me figuring stuff out as I went. However, since I was completely new to this, I’m so happy with the results and can’t wait to share them with you!
--My workspace was in the back room of my house, so not only will you see the funky holographic tablecloth (leftover from a recent party) in most of the process images, but I think it’s worth mentioning that this workspace definitely impacted my timeframe. This room is hardly a room since it has no insulation and is pretty much exposed to the elements the whole time. This means that I could only work after sundown so that I wouldn’t bake in the California midsummer heat, so besides a few days of afternoon work here and there, I could only chip away at my pack for 6 hours a night. I’ve also had a busy summer, so if you see any gaps in the dates it was probably because of that.
--Sorry about this thread getting super wordy and image heavy! I’ve been so excited to share my process that I might have gotten carried away while typing this up. I’ll post my full uniform with my finished pack in a separate thread soon so that you won’t have to scroll down to see the final results.
Now that all those are out of the way, let’s begin! I’ve decided to make this thread in a kind of diary format so everyone has a reference for how long this took me to make.
Before July - I already printed out the full-sized Stefan blueprints and they were (mostly) cut out and ready to be used as templates. Later on I realized I didn’t necessarily need ALL the pages printed out at full size, but they might come in handy if I scratch-build another pack in the future.
7/13 (17 days until convention) - my EVA foam arrives! I knew there was no time to waste after this. I gathered up all my tools, cut up the remaining blueprints, and prepped my workspace for the project.
7/14 - I cut up the EVA foam walls for the cyclotron walls. At this point I didn’t have my contact cement yet, so I moved on to the pieces I could hot glue before heading out to Home Depot.
7/15 - Cut and assembled the pieces of the power cell.
7/17 - Cut and glued the gun mount.
7/18 - Began to cut out pieces for the crank generator.
7/19 - Finished assembling the crank generator.
7/20 - Made the “booster box” and made sure that the booster tube would fit snugly inside!
7/21 - Finally got my contact cement! I assembled the entire cyclotron and glued the top pieces together. At this point I was getting so excited because I was beginning to see the resemblance of a real proton pack now!
7/22 - Began to gather up some PVC pipe that I had in my garage, cleaned it off, and learned how to use the pipe cutter. I cut two PVC pieces for the power cell injectors. As I mentioned before, weight was a huge concern of mine throughout this project so I made sure that the injectors were nice and sturdy and wouldn’t slip right out of the power cell. I took a leaf out of @robrebooted’s book and found some really sturdy fiberglass rods that were pieces of leftover party decorations. I drilled holes (using my off-brand Dremel because I was a little nervous about using the power drill at this point in the project, it took forever but at least it worked) in both of the pipes and stuck the rod through so that it secured them together and held them at the bottom of the power cell’s interior.
7/24 - Cut the PVC pipes for the 2 clippards, the PPD, and the top of the booster tube. Glued in the booster tube and attached the power cell to the booster tube box. Made the HGA and the corner plate and attached those to the assembled top parts.
7/25 - Assembled the ion arm, cut and glued the parts of the cyclotron spacer, and finally attached the cyclotron to the top parts. At this point the main shell is nearly complete, it just needs a few parts glued on, which I decided to create separately so that I can just glue them on after everything is sealed and painted. I rounded out the night by creating the bumper and shock mount.
7/26 - Created the booster frame and the bottom plates for the cyclotron. Glued everything onto the shell.
7/27 - Began to work on the thrower. This was especially tough to figure out because Stefan hasn’t finished these blueprints in quite a while. However, I was able to use a combination of his existing blueprints and a few other resources to make a good guess as to how big the thrower parts were supposed to be. While my thrower ended up being a little small, it fits alright in my small hands so I’m not complaining. Here is where you can first see how I used a cheap substitute for lighting my proton pack. I’ll go into detail about these lights in a little bit.
7/28 - I had somewhere to go today, but I was able to create the heatsink for the thrower before I left.
7/29 - Finished up the thrower, laid out some newspaper beneath the pack, and began sealing it to prep for the texturing and spray paint. I had a ton of white glue and tacky glue in my crafting supply, so I was able to use all of it and ended up covering the pack and thrower with a generous 5-6 coats.
7/30 - I closely followed what KCghostbuster had done to mask off certain parts of the pack before texturing it, and then I took the whole thing outside and laid it on the grass. I sprayed on the texture, waited 30 minutes or so, and then sprayed on the first layer of satin black paint. At this point I realized I wasn’t going to have enough satin black Krylon to finish the job, so I ended up using almost 2 whole cans of Rustoleum glossy black enamel on the whole pack, including the motherboard and the thrower. I know that a shiny pack isn’t exactly screen accurate, but so many things on my pack weren’t at this point that I decided it was okay. Besides, once all the details are put together, the shininess doesn’t matter all that much. Unfortunately this was the night when I was rushing to finish the pack so I wasn’t able to get pictures of my motherboard being cut, but I’m pretty sure it happened while I was getting everything painted. I chose to make my motherboard out of hardboard, because when I was choosing my material at Home Depot it seemed to be somewhat lighter than plywood yet extremely dense and sturdy. While I saw this as a great quality for my pack, it proved to be extremely difficult to cut. It was almost impossible to cut with my rotary tool, so a relative of mine ended up cutting it for me with his circular saw. A jigsaw probably would have been the best tool for such an intricate task, but thanks to his careful aim the cut was nearly perfect, and the few imperfections wouldn't show up on the outside of the pack anyways.
7/31 - By now I knew that it was time to use a power drill so that I could finish this thing faster. I drilled in my “v hook” to the gun mount and the underside of the thrower in the same spots where an accurate v hook would go. I realize now that it’s almost impossible to holster my thrower while I’m wearing the pack thanks to how small these picture hanging hooks are, but I’m sure that a combination of practice and tweaking the pack by adding in little bumpers on the sides of the hook could make this action a lot easier. Nevertheless, the hooks worked and held the thrower steady on the side of the pack.
Now to get more into my lighting idea for my pack. Since I was such a novice at building, I decided not to purchase the light and sound kit yet. Instead, I got a 5-pack of small battery-operated LED strings and also bought a pack of plastic lighting gels that came in red and blue. My plan was to feed the lights through small holes in the motherboard and secure them to the power cell and cyclotron (bunching up the lights into sections and then taping them in bundles with electrical tape), and have the battery packs secured on the back of the motherboard facing my back so they wouldn’t really be noticeable. The camera gels were used as a cost-effective and lightweight alternative to the red and blue acrylic lenses. I cut some shapes out of the red and blue gel sheets and glued them behind the cyclotron and power cell windows.
I began running into more trouble with my motherboard. As I aligned the four brackets and began to drill in the screw for the first bracket, I realized I was running my drill at one of the highest speeds and yet it still took minutes for the screw to puncture the board! This thing was incredibly difficult to drill, but at this point I had worked on it so much that I just had to roll with it. I drilled enough screws into the brackets so that they wouldn’t slide around the board, and then moved on to drilling holes and attaching my battery lights to the cyclotron and power cell.
I also began adding the parts that I had painted separately, like the filler tubes and the PPD.
8/1 - Today was the first day of attending the convention, so I had my failsafe ready to go! The setbacks I faced while drilling my motherboard frustrated me so much that I just had to let it be. I still enjoyed the convention even without my finished pack, so I wasn’t upset about it in the end. Even though my deadline passed me by, I still chipped away at it for a few more nights and I was much more relaxed while doing so.
8/2 - I drilled two holes in the ALICE frame and bolted the motherboard to the 4 attachment points and secured the battery lights to the board by using some electrical tape and hot glue, taking extra care not to damage the light strings with the hot glue gun (I don’t know how or if the copper wiring is affected by heat and I certainly didn’t want to find out at the moment). I also painted the ion arm rod, ribbon cable clamps, and the N filter stripe.
8/3 - I made sure that all of my painted pieces were dry and well-coated and then attached them to the pack. I also attached the bumper to the cyclotron.
8/4 - I got the pack somewhat bolted to the brackets before realizing another frustration; somehow along the way, the brackets shifted or the shell misaligned because none of the screws I was using were long enough to go through both the shell and the inner brackets. It took a lot of searching, but eventually I found some old long screws to drill in. However, when I carefully lifted the whole pack, the screws still felt sort of flimsy and it would be my worst nightmare if my pack decided to fall off of the frame in the middle of a night out in costume. I realized I had recently bought heavy-duty black zip ties in case something like this happened, and they worked like a charm. I threaded the zip ties through 3 holes on the top of the motherboard and shell, with two of them near the bracket screws or areas that seemed like they would bear the most weight and one of them on the very top just for some extra peace of mind.
8/8 - I finished getting all of the little odds and ends painted and attached them to the thrower. You can also see where I put two screws on the side - the screws conveniently fit into two holes I drilled into the PVC pipes that make up the front cylinder and back handle of the thrower. I purposefully made these two pipes longer than they had to be so that I could secure them inside the thrower body and give it more of a backbone, since the thrower body is made of somewhat flimsy poster board. I know that it would have been more accurate to put the access door on the bottom, but I was afraid of the whole thing falling off if there was too much stress on the little screws holding the body to the bottom while it was hooked onto the pack. Anyways, the door is very easy to screw on and off so that I can take the batteries out of the lights when the pack won’t be in use for a while, or swap in new batteries on the go.
8/15 - Drilling holes in the PVC pipe for the split loom was such a pain! The drill kept slipping so I ended up clamping it down with some extra EVA foam bits so that I wouldn't damage my desk or the thrower handle. After the holes were drilled, I zip tied both ends of the split loom so that my thrower was finally attached to the pack.
8/16 - I glued in the ribbon cable and its clamps. I was unsure how many zip ties were accurate for the cable, so I began with two as shown and then added a third one a little later just to make sure the cable wouldn’t untwist.
8/20 - I fashioned all of the Legris elbows from extra EVA foam and gave them a few coats of paint each to ensure that they wouldn’t be too flimsy. I also made my own brass elbows / hose barbs from a neat object I found in my house. It was some kind of zip tie set with cylindrical stops on one end and small barbs on the other, and all 3 of them had a Walmart logo on them. I think they were special ties for truckers to use since my relative was staying over after he was truck driving all week. Anyways, after I cut them up and glued the ends together and hit them with some gold paint, they looked so much like the real brass elbows (especially from far away)! I then got all of the tubes cut, attached to my elbows, and carefully glued onto my pack. I realized that some of the tubes in the pack I got from GBHQPartsDepot were going to be too stiff to attach to my thrower; none of the glues I was using would be able to secure them in such tight curves. Luckily I planned ahead and bought some flimsy USB cables from the dollar store, gutted them, and painted the cable tubing pieces in red and green. Although the unpainted tubes don’t look bad either, that gave me an idea to add some extra light-up tubes to my pack someday!
8/23 - I got a great sticker sheet from VanOaksProps on etsy! I carefully cut all the stickers out with my Xacto knife and stuck everything in its place. I ran into a slight problem; I forgot to mask off a couple areas on the pack (cyclotron and top of the pack behind the booster) before coating them with the spray texture, so if I tried to put the stickers on they would have either looked awful or would fall right off of the pack. To remedy this, I used pieces of the same thin craft foam sheet that I had used for the rings around the cyclotron lights. I cut them to match the size of the two stickers, painted them so that the stickers would stick better, and then hot glued them to the bumpy surface.
Aaaand finished! If I counted correctly, it took me about 26 nights to make a proton pack from scratch. Here’s the finished product all ready to go!
The total cost of my pack was about $181.49, not including all the found objects and materials I already had around the house, and also not including a few items that were bought and went unused in the project.
Again, I am so happy with my results and cannot wait to build another pack sometime in the near future! Thank you so much for checking out my build thread, I hope that if you’re a first-timer like me it’ll motivate you to try making one as well because it ended up being a lot of fun to create! If you have any questions, I’d be happy to answer them! (:
- By mrmichaelt
- By tobycj